NetVolution · Evolving Internet Routing: A Paradigm Shift to Foster Innovation

Although the Internet is a great technological achievement, more than 40 years after its creation some of its original security and reliability problems remain unsolved. The root cause of these problems is the rigidity of the Internet architecture or in other words the Internet ossification problem, i.e., the basic architectural components of the Internet are set to stone and cannot be changed. The most ossified component of the Internet architecture is the inter-domain routing system.In this project, our goal is to address this challenge and to introduce a new Internet routing architecture that 1) enables innovation at the inter-domain level, 2) is backward-compatible with the present Internet architecture, and 3) provides concrete economic incentives for adopting it. We propose a new Internet routing paradigm based on a novel techno-economic framework, which exploits emerging technologies and meets these three goals. Our novel idea is that the combination of routing control logic outsourcing with Software Defined Networking (SDN) principles enables to innovate at the inter-domain level and therefore has the potential for a major break-through in the architecture of the Internet routing system. SDN is a rapidly emerging new computer networking architecture that makes the routing control plane of a network programmable. Based on our framework, we propose to design, build, and verify a better inter-domain routing system, which solves fundamental security, reliability, and manageability problems of the Internet architecture. Our work will be organized in four core topics 1) build a mutli-domain centralized routing control platform, 2) improve the reliability and security of the current inter-domain routing system, 3) design techniques for resolving tussles between competing network domains, 4) introduce advanced network monitoring and security techniques that intelligently correlate data from multiple domain to diagnose routing outages and attacks.